DEMJ5104_nothing_to_fear_report_140217_WEBv1

4 Spain 3

4 Spain 3 Electoral and party political factors The flip side of the demand side of populism (the interest of the Spanish people in a populist message) is the supply side (the availability of groups and political parties offering such a message). Political demand influences the political offer and vice versa. In this respect, too, Spain occupies an interesting position. The electoral offer has been very limited, because of the disproportional effects of the Spanish electoral system and factors internal to these parties, which further explains the lack of populist mobilisation in Spain. A brief history of the far right in Spain Since the beginning of the Spanish democracy in 1977, extreme rightist parties have had little electoral appeal. They were already weak in the first parliamentary election, when the so-called Fuerza Nueva (New Force) obtained no seats and only 0.3 per cent of votes. Its ideological core was Francoist nostalgia, and the party supported various anti-liberal and anti-democratic measures. Two years later, in the second parliamentary elections of 1979, they won a single seat with 2.1 per cent of votes. That was the last time they achieved parliamentary presence. During those first years of Spanish democracy, a bigger party, Alianza Popular, headed by a leading figure of the Francoist period, Fraga Iribarne, incorporated many high- and medium-rank officials from the Francoist period, and managed to attract the conservative and religious vote. This party, the predecessor of the now ruling party, Partido Popular, obtained 8 per cent of votes in 1977, and 6 per cent in 1979, and became the country’s second biggest party in 1982 after the collapse of the Unión de Centro Democrático, the

265 centre-right reformist group, which had been at the forefront of the transition to democracy. As Xavier Casals Meseguer explains, the extreme right in Spain was not affected by the wave of ideological renovation which modified the nature of extreme rightist parties in other European countries during the 1960s as a result of reactions to decolonisation or to the 1968 cultural revolt. 38 During the first decades of the new democracy, the extreme right in Spain was the heir of Falange Española, the 1930s fascist movement that provided the ideological legitimation of the Franco regime during its first years. In 1977, its discourse felt obsolete, with no resonance among the Spanish population, which saw them as a Civil War relic. Meanwhile, the Alianza Popular, a ‘law and order’ party which was ideologically close to Francoism while at least formally accepting the basic rules of liberal democracy, left little space for other rightist parties. Figure 20 Percentage of vote extreme-right parties in Spain have won in European, national and local elections, 1975–2020 European National Local 2.5 2 Percentage 1.5 1 0.5 0 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 Source: Elaborated by authors from data from the Ministry of Interior.